Re-imagining education

Abstract

FORUM is part of the movement for instituting a system of comprehensive education. Such a system would, among other things, prevent selection of young people for different types of education in different types of schools. It would do so principally on the grounds that a selective system educationally damages all young people in it. Commitment to a system of comprehensive education entails a particular conception of human educability: that it is limitless. Such a view is radically at odds with the conception of human educability which informs arguments in support of educational selection between types of school and also within schools of any type. It poses a host of questions which adherents of comprehensive education must continue to address, related to all aspects of an education system: the nature of learning and teaching, how those who learn are to be regarded and how their learning might best be assessed, what is to be taught, how those who are taught may be grouped and organised in school, how education and democracy, school and community entwine, and more broadly, the social purposes of education. To envisage a comprehensive system is to re-imagine education thoroughly.